


(Dis)Similar Pair

by BlackEyedGirl



Category: Blades of Glory (2007)
Genre: Arguing, Friendship, Gen, Partnership, References to Addiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 10:04:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,010
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8886751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackEyedGirl/pseuds/BlackEyedGirl
Summary: Five arguments Jimmy and Chazz had about a routine, and one they didn't.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Emmzzi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emmzzi/gifts).



> With thanks to Naraht for the beta.

“I want something with a cape,” Jimmy decides.

“Nope.” Chazz doesn't even look around from the television screen. “Do you protect your mommy with that grenade?” Jimmy's pretty sure Chazz only bought the X-Box so he could yell at Japanese teenagers over the internet. “Because your aim’s worse than… Jimmy, what has terrible aim?”

“I guess the stormtroopers in Star Wars?”

Chazz gives him a deeply unimpressed look and tells the kid, “worse than a drunk over a urinal. On a boat. A boat on a stormy sea. Navigating a-” Something onscreen explodes. “Son a of-”

There is a burst of triumphant Japanese which Jimmy is not translating, thank you very much, no matter what Chazz says. Anyway, he has more important things to worry about. “Capes move. They _flow_.”

From the kitchen Jesse interjects, “Capes get tangled in your skates when you're being thrown and you both die horribly.”

“We don't want that,” Katie adds. She's sitting around the table with Jesse and Coach, trying to fix something with image rights that Jimmy doesn't understand. Which is why Jimmy is in the sitting room watching Chazz shoot things in a war torn alien landscape. He supposes they could do something like that for their new routine but dystopia feels a little overdone the last few years.

“Nobody's going to die horribly,” Coach says. Jimmy honestly isn't sure if he's even listening to the conversation.

Jimmy sits on the couch beside Chazz. “Not for the whole routine, obviously. Just for the opening section, then I would toss it out into the crowd.”

“Nope,” Chazz says again. “I don't do capes.”

Jimmy blinks. “I don't mean _you_ need a cape.” They don't always have matching costumes; it depends on the routine.

“You're skating with me. If you're wearing a cape, _I'm_ wearing a cape. Even if I'm not wearing a cape.”

“That doesn't make sense.”

“ _You_ don't-”

“Chazz!”

“Capes are for girls.”

Jimmy feels a throbbing start behind his eyes. He rubs his temples to see if he can make it go away. Anyway: “I thought I _was_ the girl when I dance with you? Princess, remember?”

He shouldn't have said that. Chazz is going to bring it up some time later when Jimmy wants to be the one to throw him.

Now, though, Chazz frowns the way that he does when he's reminded he used to say some really mean things. He asks, “You even have a routine for the cape?”

Jimmy doesn't. He just really wants a cape. He can see that part: the cape flying behind him, thrown into the cheering fans. He doesn't know what the rest looks like. He’s not like Chazz - he never used to improvise, he still feels uneasy without a plan for what he’s supposed to be doing on the ice. 

Chazz elbows him. “We're not wearing capes just because you're bored.”

Jimmy elbows him back, harder. “I'm not bored.”

“Good!” Chazz answers, too loud.

“Okay!” Jimmy retorts.

Katie pokes her head into the sitting room. “Everything all right in here?”

“Can we go upstairs?” Jimmy asks.

“Um. Okay?” Katie casts a quick look at Chazz. “Goodnight, Chazz?”

“Night, Katie,” he answers. Chazz yells in the vague direction of the kitchen, “Are you two going to be in our house all night? Because if so I’m making protein shakes.” Probably only Chazz knows how those two things are connected, but pretty soon the blender is running.

“Oh,” Jimmy realises, halfway up the stairs, “you thought I meant upstairs for- we were arguing about a new routine. Though maybe… maybe we could leave planning the routine for later?”

Katie smiles at him. “Okay.” 

It’s not until afterwards, Katie’s hair spread on the pillow beside him, that Jimmy thinks about the routine again. “I still want a cape.”

“And Chazz doesn’t?” she asks. “I guess he’s not exactly into that kind of costume.”

“No,” Jimmy admits. “But I-”

“I was a little surprised to see him in the Lycra, that first routine you did. His singles routines were always so... I don’t know, unembellished?”

Jimmy isn’t sure that’s the word he would use, but he supposes Chazz’s singles routines wouldn’t have included capes. Flames, borderline-illegal jumps, and more direct interaction with the crowds than Jimmy was comfortable with, but no capes. Now that he thinks about it, maybe their routines as a pair have tended towards costuming choices that Jimmy likes. Chazz tends to feel more strongly about music and the lifts. “I need to find something we both like,” Jimmy says.

“Star Wars?” Katie suggests. She turns on her side to smile sleepily at him.

Jimmy’s pretty sure she’s joking, but he stores the idea away for later. Luke wears a cape. Chazz could be Han Solo with the vest and gun-belt – he’d probably like that. And it’s got that music...

Katie kisses his cheek. “I can hear you planning.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s nice. I like that you care about it.” She pauses for a moment. “Chazz is going to fight you about all of it every step of the way, but I kind of like that too.”

So does Jimmy, honestly. They don’t fight about everything now, but they do still argue. When it was just him and Coach and his Dad, Jimmy hadn’t argued about routines. They knew what was best for him. Jimmy had always been glad he didn’t have to deal with the dynamics of pairs skating, the way they always brought their drama into the locker room and out onto the ice with them. Katie says Stranz and Fairchild never fought about anything but Jimmy thinks that must just have been them, because the other pairs – even the ones who were dating – seemed to be arguing as often as not. Jimmy gets that now. Sometimes that’s just the way you get to the compromise – they’re at their best when they’re _both_ at their best.

 

+

They've been working on getting a new routine ready for Nationals. Jimmy thinks Coach might be getting sick of them - he keeps giving them new choreography and then changing it. Nothing's really sticking. Including their landings.

Jimmy stretches out his leg and winces. He presses his thumb into the aching muscle and lets out an involuntary yelp. He should have got a rub-down before coming home, but he’s still not used to having real facilities again. They had driven home together, but Chazz is still in the shower – for all that he complains about Jimmy’s beauty routines, Chazz takes far longer to clean up. 

He hears the shower stop and Chazz wanders in, carefully towelling his hair dry. “Ouch,” he comments.

“How’s your hip?”

Shrugging one shoulder, Chazz drops onto the couch beside Jimmy. “Been worse. Remember that time in ‘03 when I fractured my wrist after that arm-wrestling tournament before the short programs?”

Jimmy blinks. “ _That’s_ how you got hurt?”

“I didn’t tell you this one?” Chazz grins. “Settle down, Jimmy, and prepare to be amazed.”

Jimmy doesn’t doubt that. He props his foot on the table (no one here will tell him to be careful of the furniture) and leans over the edge of the couch to grab his bag. He’s still thinking about costume ideas and he’s been working on something. Not the Jedi routine, which they can’t use until Jimmy knows exactly what to do with it, but something that plays to their strengths. He unwraps a tangle of material and tries to find where he had put the needle. Sewing is a slow process.

“Is that fur?” Chazz asks.

“Not real fur, obviously.” Jimmy holds it up. “Fake. Just for the trim.” It doesn’t want to attach to the rest of the material. Jimmy sticks his thumb with the needle and blood wells up. He sucks the spot and glares resentfully down at the Lycra. 

“You are so bad at that.”

Jimmy looks at Chazz. “What?”

“I don't understand how you can suck so much at something.”

Jimmy looks back at the sleeve. “Me, or anyone?”

“You are setting new records at being terrible. Is this your first time with a needle?”

That’s not fair. Jimmy can put buttons back on (now) and fix a hem if he needs to. “It’s my first time trying to make a costume,” he points out. 

Chazz takes the fabric from him. “Let me show you how it’s done.” It sounds more like a dare than an offer, but Jimmy sits back. Chazz shakes his head. “What the-?” He starts to unpick Jimmy’s work. 

“It was fine,” Jimmy says. “I was just trying something out.”

“We can do better than ‘fine’,” Chazz says. “I used to make all my own costumes.”

Jimmy holds back an automatic retort that Chazz’s costumes used to be mostly black denim and leather held together with holes. “You did?”

Chazz keeps his eyes on the needle, carefully pulling the edges into line. His hands look a little strange doing such small work. He says, “No coaches, no choreographers, no fancy designers either.”

“I didn’t have…” Jimmy trails off. He guesses they had been fancy; he had just let his dad sort that kind of thing out. He had known what Jimmy’s strengths were and how to make him look good. Now, Jimmy is trying to figure that out all over again for Chazz and him together. It’s more work this way, but he doesn’t want to ask for help. (Chazz doesn’t count.)

Chazz keeps talking like Jimmy didn’t say anything. “What is this? A cat?”

It’s a wolf, but Jimmy isn’t finished with it yet. “Let me see.” He pulls his feet onto the couch underneath him and leans closer to Chazz. 

Chazz can be patient, sometimes – he lets Jimmy watch while he sews and tells the story of how he almost ended his career to a fracture earned trying to arm-wrestle a Norwegian curler. 

Jimmy’s halfway to asleep on Chazz’s shoulder when Chazz nudges him. “The rest of the pack’s here.”

Katie pushes the door open and smiles at them both. “Chazz, you weren’t letting Jimmy sew, were you?”

“I would never do that,” Chazz tells her gravely.

“My sewing’s fine!” Jimmy protests. “Chazz was just helping with the fiddly parts.”

“All of the parts,” Chazz corrects. “We’re turning Jimmy into a pretty wolf.”

“Oh, you decided on the new routine?” Katie asks. 

Chazz nods and Jimmy shakes his head (because they haven’t actually talked about anything), and the whole thing ends in Chazz tackling Jimmy over the arm of the couch while Katie laughs at both of them. But they do eventually work that into a new short routine.

 

+

Jimmy doesn't think he's been this angry in years. Even during the Games in Montréal, when they were fighting all the time, he had been more frustrated than properly mad. (Then there had been Katie, and that night he had been betrayed, and heartbroken by both of them, but too upset to be angry.)

Chazz stinks of alcohol, and something that might be vomit or just stale sweat and whatever bar he was in last night.

“Does this not _matter_ to you any more?” Jimmy demands. “We said eight a.m., Chazz. You said we could take the whole day and work this routine out.” Jimmy had been at the rink from seven-thirty, warming up ready to start when Chazz arrived. Which he did, at ten-thirty, hungover or maybe still drunk.

Chazz winces. “Buddy, could there be less yelling? Otherwise this hangover is going to get ugly _fast_.”

“I don't care!”

Chazz holds his head in one hand, skin taking on a pale greenish tint. “Jimmy, brother…”

“We said… you said we could keep going, you said we could keep up with the teenagers, and _this is not what I thought you meant_.” He hears the screech in his voice and doesn't care. “What the fuck, Chazz?”

“Okay,” Coach says, pulling Jimmy back with one hand. “Let's all calm down. Chazz, go take a shower, drink some coffee and try to come back looking and smelling less like something a bar hound threw up. Jimmy, with me.”

Even from the edge of the rink, Jimmy can hear Chazz retching in the locker-room toilets.

Coach pushes Jimmy onto the ice. “Laps.”

“Why am _I_ being punished when he's the one who never-?”

“You're not being punished, you need out of your head. Laps. I don't want to hear anything but blades on ice.”

Jimmy has been skating for probably fifteen minutes before Chazz joins him, taking up the inside lane. His circles get tighter and tighter until he skates into a spin, which cannot be good for his stomach, but Chazz can be a masochist sometimes.

“Stop,” Jimmy tells him, snatching at his arm and missing. He tries again and catches Chazz, but the continued momentum crashes them both to the ice. “Ow, fuck.”

Coach is watching them from the edge of the rink. He's frowning. “Let me call Jesse. I have an idea.”

Two hours later, Chazz still looks ill and they have the middle section of something new. Jimmy asks, “You really want to do this now?”

“I've skated feeling way shittier than this,” Chazz tells him. “I want to get this down.”

“Fine.”

“Jimmy… it wasn't anything to do with- sometimes that's what I- it’s not always something I have under control. I'm trying.”

Jimmy sighs. “I know, okay?” But he's not sure that he does. There's not much on the list of things Jimmy cares about as much as skating. Those three years banned from competition, he still skated every day, spending what he could afford on rink time when there would be no one to look at him and ask what Jimmy MacElroy was doing out there on his own in the dark. He had barely looked at a girl before Katie, still doesn't much like the taste of alcohol and doesn't even know the names of some of the things Chazz has put into his body.

Jesse calls them over. “So Chazz is in the inside, Jimmy orbiting on the outside. You're going to pull the circle closer until Chazz is in a spin.”

He puts on some music; they’ll probably change it later when they have the details finalised, but the beat is right. Chazz is spinning and spinning and something on his face is starting to scare Jimmy. Not always under control, Chazz had said. Jimmy moves in and out of Chazz’s path, the way they’ve planned it. “Wait,” he calls. “This is- wait.”

Chazz slows down. “You okay, are you hurt?”

“No, I’m fine, I just- I’m not sure about this routine, this is...” This is personal. This is about the stuff they don’t talk about and the times they didn’t spend together unable to compete. They don’t bring that onto the ice. “We don’t need to do this.”

“It’s a good routine,” Chazz says. “Better than any of the crap we were working on yesterday.” 

Coach rolls his eyes but doesn’t object out loud. “It’s good for you two,” he says. “It’s not like what you did last time, but it works. It’ll surprise people, and God knows we can do with some of that.”

Jimmy isn’t going to win this argument. “Okay, then let’s... we can swap. I’ll spin and Chazz can pull me out of it.”

Jesse says, “Come on, it has to be Chazz. This needs to look like… it has to look dangerous.”

Chazz leers. “And we all know I’m the most dangerous skater out there.”

“That’s not a- fine. Let’s try it again.”

They reset and go again, Chazz launching himself into another spin as the music picks up. Jimmy reaches in either side of him twice and then grabs him. This time they spin out together. Jimmy is smaller and lighter and he isn’t usually the one to arrest their momentum but he controls the spin. They bounce off the boards but stay upright. Jimmy rests his forehead on Chazz’s chest, heart pounding. Chazz murmurs, “Good catch.”

“I’m here,” Jimmy says. “Okay? I can take it.”

“I know, buddy. Let’s go again.”

  


+

Jimmy doesn’t know if Chazz thinks about what he’s going to do after this. He never talks about it. Jimmy didn’t think about it before, but now he knows that he doesn’t want to end up arguing with seven-year-olds in skate shops. He doesn’t talk about it with Chazz either; they’re friends now, but he still thinks Chazz might laugh. 

Wanda approaches him after an exhibition. She’s just graduated into seniors competition and she needs to make a decision about pairs. She wants Jimmy to watch their routine. Jimmy feels like he’s spent enough of his life being coached that maybe he can at least give them a pointer or two.

In the rink, Wanda skates onto the ice with her partner.

Jimmy stares. “You’re both girls.”

Wanda stares back. “This is Jayme.”

“Is this why you asked me?”

Jayme pushes back a loose hair that Jimmy can’t see, tugging at her braid. “We thought you wouldn’t laugh at us. You and Michaels are… kind of an inspiration.”

Jimmy thinks about Chazz, currently starfished on the couch in his underwear, humming something off-key about ice-women. He thinks about Coach and Jesse, working for months to get them in a position to be able to compete, with Chazz and Jimmy arguing all the while.

Wanda holds his gaze. “They let you do it. They can’t change their minds now.”

Jimmy takes a breath. “Show me what you have.”

It’s the next week before Chazz follows him to the rink. “I gotta make sure you’re steering these poor chicks right.”

“They’re doing fine,” Jimmy says. 

He might have tempted fate, saying that, or the girls are trying to impress Chazz. They take the spin too fast, Wanda releases late or Jayme is under-rotated, and she falls. Jayme takes short breaths, curled against the boards.

Chazz nods at Wanda. “You’re being the dude,” he says. “You gotta lift her back up.”

Wanda observes, “We’re both girls, no one's the dude.”

Chazz rolls his eyes. “Fine, whatever. Point is: she's down, and right now you have to give her a hand to get up again. That's the role.”

Things… click in Jimmy’s head, while Wanda does indeed reach her hand down and tug Jayme to her feet.

Jayme smiles a thanks and then looks at Chazz. “Is that what you do?”

Chazz shakes his head. “We switch it up.”

Jimmy grabs Chazz’s hand. “Come here.” He calls over to the girls, “You’re trying to do what the mixed pairs do.”

Wanda shouts back. “And you’re saying we can’t?”

“No, I’m saying you have to- what Coach said to us, was to do what couldn’t be done with a man and a woman. So we have a lot of throws, and we switch off on the lifts. You’re going to be better with spins, and spiral sequences, because you’re way more flexible and you’re both going to get good height in a jump. You have to do what shows both of you off.”

“And I am _excellent_ at showing Jimmy here off,” Chazz boasts, before switching their hold and throwing Jimmy into a spin. They skate back towards each other for side by side skate clashes, which Chazz always likes because of the sparks. They get back beside each other and Chazz nods at Wanda and Jayme. “Now you.”

 

+

They stand shoulder to shoulder, watching the men's individual finals. Japan is going to take Gold and Silver, though Jimmy and Chazz disagree on the order. Canada probably gets Bronze, though the little Ukrainian might pull something out here. Vernaiev flings himself into a jump which defies the basic laws of aerodynamics and Jimmy has to smile. That was _beautiful_.

He nudges Chazz. “You ever miss it?”

“Yes. What? No. Sometimes.”

Jimmy - who asked the question for Christ’s sake - tries to keep his expression neutral.

He must fail, because Chazz backtracks further. “I didn't mean it like that. Words are dead to me.” He grabs Jimmy's shoulder. “In pairs, I can’t just think about me. I have to think about where you are, and if you look okay, and making sure you don’t fall.”

“I’ve only fallen once,” Jimmy points out, a little stung.

Chazz growls deep in his throat. “I’m not worried you’ll fall, I’m worried I’ll _drop you_. Shit matters more, when I skate with you.”

“Oh.”

Chazz shrugs. “I didn’t worry when it was just me. That’s what I meant. Kind of.”

“It's just… it's not like that with me. Not that I don't-!” Jimmy tries to think how to say it. “Not that it doesn't matter. It's just… I worry less, on the ice with you. When it was just me, no matter how the crowd reacted, no matter if I _knew_ that I had been good, I didn't really trust it until I got off the ice, and my Dad… there was always something wrong, you know? But with you… I know you have my back. And you always see the good stuff.”

Chazz, in one of his recurrent but unpredictable bursts of sentiment, says, “You do lots of good stuff.”

“Thanks.” Jimmy smiles. “You too.”

“Must be why we make such a good team,” Chazz says. He looks at something over Jimmy’s shoulder. “Are you fucking kidding me? I want a drugs test on the judging panel, can I get a steward over here?”

Jimmy steers him out of view of the screens displaying the scores Chazz disagrees with; fans of all nationalities; and any cameras. On the plus side, Jimmy was right about the order of Gold and Silver. 

 

+

They're starting in hold. They don't always - they do a lot of mirroring and shadowing - but this is an idea Jimmy had. It's sort of space-related, he guesses, though it's more concept than specifics. He does get to wear a cape.

Chazz refused the cape but 'doesn’t hate’ the routine. (“I still think you just wanted to tell people I was a gassy giant” / “Gas giant, Chazz, and Jesse said that. It's a type of planet.”) Chazz is wearing black with red accents; Jimmy is in black and silver.

They skate onto the ice not touching, but close, no more than a hands-width apart. (“It's about gravity, I think,” Jimmy said, not sure that he understood it all but knowing what he meant, “like being tied together so you react to each other’s movement, even when you're not touching.”)

Jimmy pulls the cape into the right place across his chest, testing the fastening to make sure it will hold until he needs it to and then release with one pull. He wants to get this right. He always wants to get it right.

Chazz rests his hand on Jimmy's hip and Jimmy covers it with his own. Chazz nudges Jimmy's skate with his toe-pick, pushing it to a new position.

Jimmy rolls his eyes, speaking out of the corner of his mouth. They've been partners for three years now, and every time they're caught arguing someone speculates that they still secretly hate each other. Jimmy is mostly amused by the way that Chazz - renowned for being uninterested in perfection - is the one who can never resist making the tiny on the fly adjustments. Jimmy tells him, “I was fine, you know.”

“Sure,” Chazz says. He straightens his back, braced for the music to start. “But this is better than fine. You and me are going to be awesome.”

The announcer calls, “Competing for the United States of America, Chazz Michael Michaels and Jimmy MacElroy.” The music starts and somewhere someone is saying ‘ _starting_ with a death spiral is highly unusual, but then this pair have never done things the easy way.’ Jimmy transitions into a Biellmann and then twists his hands, trusting Chazz to take hold of him. There is an indrawn breath from the crowd as Jimmy is spun out, flying. And Jimmy might not tell him, but Chazz was right.


End file.
